Near Field Communication (NFC) technology is rapidly becoming commonplace in today’s mobile devices. The technology has the potential to change the way consumers pay for goods, access buildings and transportation, and exchange contact information while at the same time enabling new, individualized marketing opportunities for advertisers.

As the ecosystem continues to develop and mature, one of the requirements for mobile payment and storage of personal information is data security. For NFC, this is done through a secure element. This secure element can take many forms including integration into a SIM card (allowing any mobile device to become NFC enabled), stand alone circuits that are integrated directly into the mobile system, and integration into the application processor or media control system-on-chip (SoC) itself. What is common to any secure element is the requirement for encryption keys, which likely requires some form of non-volatile memory (NVM) for key or data storage.

Although it is impossible to prevent hackers from trying to attack systems, making the wrong selection in NVM technology to store security and encryption keys can leave a system even more vulnerable to attacks. A breach that exposes an individual’s financial or personal information could lead to widespread doubt about the security of NFC technology and derail the industry’s adoption.

This whitepaper will help system architects and SoC designers gain familiarity with the options and trade-offs of the various NVM IP on the market today in order to make the right selection, ensuring the maximum security of their system data, by addressing:

1. The main technologies used in NVM IP today for data storage: fuse / antifuse or floating gate and their basic differences
2. The common reverse engineering techniques of most concern to designers developing secure elements for NFC
3. The most resistant NVM IP technology to reverse engineering schemes

To download this white paper, click here.

Tags: Synopsys

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 15th, 2011 at 12:01 am and is filed under White Papers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.